A REFERENDUM should be held to determine whether Australians want a human rights charter, Australian Christian Lobby director Jim Wallace said.
By Anthony Barich
The National Human Rights Consultation Committee recommended on October 8 that Australia should adopt a Human Rights Act and give the High Court power to issue “declarations of incompatibility” over federal laws. However Mr Wallace said that by giving judges power to make such declarations, the recommendation “incorporated the most undemocratic aspects of a bill or charter of rights”.
He said it was ironic that Victorian Christians had just spent nine months fighting a human rights-inspired review of equal opportunity laws which threatened the right to religious freedom guaranteed in international law.
Former NSW Premier Bob Carr told a group of church leaders in Melbourne recently that he strongly believes the first thing that will happen if a Charter of Human Rights is introduced in Australia is that particular interest groups will challenge the exemptions enjoyed by Churches in state and federal anti-discrimination laws.
National Civic Council president Peter Westmore expressed doubts about the Committee’s claim of overwhelming public support for a federal Human Rights Act.
While it said 29,153 submissions were in favour and 4,203 were opposed to it, the report added that it was the question of a Human Rights Act that prompted GetUp!, Amnesty International Australia and the Australian Christian Lobby to conduct public campaigns during the consultation: of the 29,153 submissions in favour of a Human Rights Act, 26,382 were campaign submissions.”
“If one excludes the ‘campaign submissions’, only 2,771 were in favour of a Human Rights Act and 4,203 opposed it on the Committee’s calculations – a far cry from the overwhelming support claimed by the Committee,” Mr Westmore said.
The Committee also commissioned a report from Colmar Brunton Social Research to gauge the views of the broader community, and found that 10 per cent of people reported that they had ever had their rights infringed in any way, with another 10 per cent who reported that someone close to them had their rights infringed. Their research also found that “64 percent of survey respondents agreed that human rights in Australia are adequately protected; only seven per cent disagreed; the remaining 29 per cent were non-committal.”
Mr Westmore says these figures reveal that most people believe human rights in Australia are adequately protected and those who made submissions to the inquiry are, on the whole, not representative of mainstream Australia.
The Committee reported that human rights in Australia are not being adequately protected, particularly in relation to the Northern Territory intervention in Aboriginal communities, asylum seekers and in the operation of national security laws.
However, Mr Westmore said that of the 35,000 submissions received – most from the “human rights industry” – only a “tiny minority” dealt with these issues.
Chapter 15 of the Committee report revealed 1,309 (4 percent) raised concerns about racism, 581 (1.7 per cent) about indigenous rights, 235 (0.7 per cent) the Northern Territory intervention and 191 (0.5 per cent) the Racial Discrimination Act.
“It is clear that the consultation was hijacked by political and human rights activists, and its conclusions reflect their views and not those of a majority who, the Committee acknowledges, believe that Australians live in ‘one of the world’s great democracies’,” he said.